"The investigations have fanned fears that China is exploiting the relative openness of the American scientific system to engage in wholesale economic espionage. At the same time, the scale of the dragnet has sent a tremor through the ranks of biomedical researchers, some of whom say ethnic Chinese scientists are being unfairly targeted for scrutiny as Washington’s geopolitical competition with Beijing intensifies...
The alleged theft involves not military
secrets, but scientific ideas, designs, devices, data and methods that
may lead to profitable new treatments or diagnostic tools.
Some
researchers under investigation have obtained patents in China on work
funded by the United States government and owned by American
institutions, the N.I.H. said. Others are suspected of setting up labs
in China that secretly duplicated American research, according to
government officials and university administrators...
The real question, [Dr. Michael Lauer, ] added, is how to preserve the open exchange of
scientific ideas in the face of growing security concerns. At M.D.
Anderson, administrators are tightening controls to make data less freely available."
